Some mainstream opinion of podcasting

This week a major Australian daily paper put out a story on how podcasting is gaining acceptance there. What they are seeing is similar to what we have been discussing here on GNC recently. Their view of podcasting is more of an extension to radio, than a replacement of it. Not hard to understand why they have this view when mainstream radio dominates the podcast charts on iTunes.

For the few who are yet to catch on, podcasting enables people to listen to their favourite radio programs whenever they like by downloading them, once they have gone to air, onto their computers.

Some interesting information in this article is their access to talk direct to radio as to what their view of the podcast market is. In Australia the main public broadcaster is seeing in the vicinity of 2 million downloads a month. The largest commercial station is seeing about 850,000 per month over 4 shows releasing 2–5 podcasts per week. They are seeing considerable growth of around 50,000 per month. Some back of the envelope calculations show that they have about 100,000 listeners on podcast, which is about 3% of their on air listeners. Even given this though they claim to make about 20% of their online revenue from podcast advertising.

Given the ease of creating the podcast from content that has already been recorded during broadcast, this must be some of the easiest money the radio stations make, and no wonder they have been keen to get their popular dj’s onto podcasts. They are keen to not bleed listener figures due to podcasting though, as this directly effects their advertising revenue. To cover this they have been campaigning to Nielsen to include podcast in their radio ratings.

Interesting to see some info on what radio is thinking in terms of their podcasting strategy.